Trump Is Moving Fast And Breaking Things, A Lot Of Things, Already - And We Need To Get Loud, Very, Very Loud
Simon Rosenberg
We all wake up to the news of the horrible collision of a Black Hawk helicopter and a commercial airliner at Reagan National Airport, the airport most Members of Congress use to fly home dozens of times a year (I flew out of Dulles Airport yesterday). The hard, cold reality for the Trump Administration is that their early, fanatical blitzkrieg included removing and forcing out those in charge of aviation security for the United States. The entire system was disrupted, employees and air traffic controllers threatened with firing and harassed. And over 60 people died.
In a new series of threads on Bluesky a long serving public health official, Atul Gawande, details how the various actions by the Trump Administration to freeze US global public health activities and coordination will lead to far more people dying here in the US and around the world. To repeat - Trump’s team, in their early frenzy - has already taken steps that guarantees Americans will die.
In a new Substack post the great Anne Applebaum does a round up of articles and interviews detailing the damage Trump’s savage assault on the US government has and will cause. It is worth spending time with in the coming days. In the post she writes:
In February 1895, Theodore Roosevelt, who had not yet become president, wrote an article for The Atlantic entitled “The Present Status of Civil Service Reform.” At that time, the American government’s civil service operated according to the spoils system, also known as patronage, meaning that whoever is in power gets to fire everyone and appoint his own people, even to menial jobs. Patronage systems, which still exist in much of the world, are both corrupt and corrupting. Officials take bribes in exchange for job appointments; unqualified people, appointed because they are someone’s cousin, produce bad government and bad services; partisan people, appointed because they toe the party line, facilitate graft.
https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/trump-is-moving-fast-and-breaking-bf5
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